Have you started using Twitter but unsure how to really get the most out of it for recruiting and business development purposes? Twitter Lists can really help you become a part of an engaged community.

Here are 4 types of list that can help you super-charge and focus your time on Twitter.

The Unmissable

There are some people whose tweets you have to see. You best friend, your mum (maybe), your clients, or breaking news about your favourite band (you wouldn’t want to miss gig tickets!). A list containing some or all of these people can help you check only the most essential tweets if you’re in a hurry.

In this category, I have a “VIPs” list for friends and family, a “Clients” list for those I work or have worked with and a “Doctor Who” list.

You might want to keep some of these lists set to private, especially the “Clients” one!

The Attention Grabber

If you want to grow a following on Twitter then you need to get people’s attention. Simply tweeting your guts out isn’t always enough.

You can of course follow lots of people and hope they will follow you back, but a high ratio of following to followers can look a bit desperate.

This is when I use lists.

Create a list and add the sort of people you would like to have as followers to it. I use this approach on the UK Sourcers Twitter account. I add any recruiters I come across on Twitter to a list called “UK Recruitment Types”. If they then check out the account and choose to follow, I make sure to follow back.

By their very nature, this type of list has to be set to public, rather than private, otherwise no one will know they’ve been listed.

The Networker

When you go to an event, the networking aspect can be tough for those of us that aren’t quite as extrovert as others. Run a search on the event name and the event #hashtag in the weeks ahead and build yourself a list of all the twitter users attending. That way you can get to know them and exchange tweets ahead of meeting in person.

There are a lot of events we can’t go to as well – time and money are not limitless. You can however use the same method as above to access those attending events, even when you can’t be there yourself.

It’s up to you if you want to keep your list private or make it public and benefit from “The Attention Grabber” effect too.

The Infiltrator

This type of list is really handy if you recruit people in a niche community.

Create a private list of people that work in your niche, have a particular job title, or who work for a competitor. Then visit that list on a regular basis and reply to its members’ tweets – but only if you have something worthwhile to contribute. Be helpful, insightful or funny and become a part of this community. Engaging out of work hours is particularly good – what do these people watch on TV? If you watch it too, you can join in with their tweets. These people are more than their job titles, in the same way that you are more than a recruiter.

The next time you mention a job that is relevant to this community, they will be far more likely to share it for you.

The Cuckoo

Don’t have time to raise your own chicks create your own lists? Use the lists that others have created.

You could pick interesting people and rifle through the lists they are on and the lists they have created (if any). This is great way to find similar profiles.

You can also use the site: search command with Google to search for interesting Twitter lists. Try a search string like this with your own keywords instead:

#TruLondon 7#TruLondon returns the City Hotel on 6th & 7th March. Come along to be a part of the conversation.

Social Media

LinkedIn
LinkedIn totally shattered their financial predictions. Recruitment accounted for 54% of its income last year. It was reported on the SourceCon blog that LinkedIn intends to raise its process for recruitment customers in the US and “some other areas” in the second quarter of 2013. Having announced 200 million members not long ago and engagement levels on the site rising exponentially, LinkedIn look like a formidable force.

Vine
Vine is the hot new thing from Twitter. If you have an iPhone then you can share a tiny six second video clip with Vine. Some brands have already been getting in on the action and creating some Vine videos. I saw quite a lot of updates on Vine from SourceCon in Atlanta last week too. Do you think you could make a Vine job ad or recruitment video?

Twitter Search
Now when you search for a keyword of interest on Twitter you will see results from further back than just seven days! Last week twitter extended their search results to include the most popular updates for your keywords tweeted at any time in the past – try searching for something obscure and see the results! Great for us Sourcers that are looking for rare skills.

I think this is a real shame as it can be a great sourcing tool. I have spoken many times about how powerful events can be for sourcers and that Social Media sites offer you the opportunity get something out of an event even if you are unable to attend – who has the time or money to go to everything?

If you’d still like to let your LinkedIn network know what events you will be attending then using LinkedIn’s status updates could be a good alternative. This also gives you the opportunity to say more about why you’re going than just using LinkedIn Events would have done.

LinkedIn’s Events App is, of course, only one small way to follow the plethora of breadcrumbs left online by event attendees. So, what other apps could we start using to discover events, promote our own events and source names of interesting people to talk to?

Eventbrite

Event organisers use Eventbriteto manage ticket sales for their events and as a promotion tool. This makes it a huge, fully searchable, events directory. I would guess that most people reading this blog have registered to attend an event through Eventbrite at least once before, but have you ever used it to search for events?

Some event organisers make the attendee lists of their events publicly visible. This is really useful for us! You can search for events very effectively from inside Eventbrite or if you just want to find events that are displaying a list of attendees then try X-raying Eventbrite via Google or another search engine like this:

Eventbrite is particularly good for: Event Discovery & Name Sourcing (if the organiser has chosen to display an attendee list). Similar Tool: Amiando

Facebook Events

Not every event on Facebookis for “Toni’s 30th Birthday Bash”. A lot of big conferences and smaller networking groups promote their events on Facebook. Try X-Raying Facebook to find events in your industry. A string like this might help you get started:

site:facebook.com inurl:events “industry keywords” location

The intitle:operator can be useful here as event names form part of the page title.

As you can see above, there are often lists of those attending, invited, maybe attending… and you can see all their names just by clicking. Of course, some networking and event communities have Facebook pages. Take London’s Digital Sizzle community, for example. At the time of writing they have 512 likes on their Facebook page – if this is the sort of talent you’re looking for then these people are probably of interest. Facebook might not let you see those 512 names, but if you take a look at the page’s most recent posts and hover over where it says “3 people like this” – then you will see the names of those three people. No doubt three people very engaged with that page and those events. You can also see who has commented on and shared posts made by a Facebook page.

The names you gather on Facebook can be cross referenced with a Google or LinkedIn search.

Facebook Events are particularly good for: Name SourcingFurther Reading: Cracking open Facebook by Balazs Paroczay

Lanyrd

Lanyrd is an app that helps people discover events via their Twitter networks. If you use twitter then you probably have quite a chunk of followers that work in a similar niche to your business.

Sign in at Lanyrd with your Twitter credentials to find out what events your network is going to be attending. You can even get weekly event suggestions sent to your inbox. Build 2012 seems to be very popular in my network this week:

Lanyrd allows people to register both that they are attending the event or if they are just interested and would like to track the event. This means that you often get a lot more useful names (with links to their Twitter profiles) than you would do from a straight forward attendee list.

If an event is popular on Lanyrd then its attendees are probably going to generate quite a lot of tweets on the day too – remember to set yourself a reminder to monitor Twitter on the day of the event to find more attendees. The page above tells us to use the #buildconf hashtag. I’ll say more about hashtags later.

Lanyrd is particularly good for: Discovery and Name Sourcing.Similar Tools: Plancast

Meetup

Meetup is a great hybrid of community and events. Some people join an event community on Meetup but never actually attend an event. Like Lanyrd, it gives you that bit extra compared with a standard attendee list.

The URLs for groups and people profiles make X-raying Meetup really easy too.

Take the PHP London meetup group. It has 1,696 members who will all have a profile page. If I wanted to find developers with experience on eCommerce sites I might try a string like this:

An event’s hashtag can sometimes be slow to emerge. It is worth leaving a search running for “the name of the event” in quote marks weeks, even months, before a big conference or expo.

If attending or sponsoring an event, I will often build a Twitter list of all those I find that look like they will be attending. It’s then easy for me to spend a little time ahead of the event interacting with those people via Twitter. This makes meeting up on the day much easier as you already feel you know each other and feel part of a community.

Twitter is particularly good for: Being there even when you can’t attend, Name Sourcing, Discovery & Promotion.Further Reading: What is a #Hashtag?

Do you use any other sites to identify great events and the talent that attends them?

UK Sourcers News

Last Week we ran a competition for Talk Like A Pirate Day in our LinkedIn group. The runaway winner was Ralph Meyer of Gartner who submitted an incredible list of over 6,000 pirates with LinkedIn profiles! Ralph will soon be receiving a shipment of buried treasure.

Events

The Onrec Conference and Exhibition takes place on Thursday 4th October in London. The speaker of most interest to Sourcers will likely be Laura Stoker of AIRS, talking about Revolutionary Resourcing. You can still get yourself a ticket to the conference or attend the exhibition for free.

Also coming up in October is #TruLondon 6. If unconferencing is more your style then this is the event for you. Get your ticket for two days of fully disorganised learning at The Recruiting Unconference.

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Twitter has a great feature to help recruiters and sourcers find relevant and respected twitter accounts – Twitter Lists. This feature isn’t very well promoted though so might not be immediately discovered by new users.

If you are an active Twitter user then you will not have failed to notice a few notifications appearing in your “@Connect” section saying that someone has added you to a list or two. You might even have created a few lists of your own.

What are Twitter lists?

A Twitter user can create a list and add Twitter accounts that interest them to it. You don’t have to follow a person to add them to one of your lists. Once you create and name a list you can start adding people to it right away using the little drop down menu on their profile.

A twitter list can be public (other people can see who is on it and choose to follow it) or private (only you know who is on your private lists and only you can make use of them).

You can find someone’s Twitter lists by visiting their profile on twitter.com and looking at the options on the left hand side of the page. You can view @UKSourcers’ Twitter lists here: http://twitter.com/uksourcers/lists

What is so great about Twitter Lists?

People more knowledgeable than you do all the hard work: people create lists of people that share their interests. I have a list of Star Trek fans, I know that they are all massive Trekkers but very few of them probably mention this in their Twitter bios. I also have a list of Sourcers that are based in the UK. People often create lists of other people in their industry or people they met at a particular event. This is really useful curation.

Follow targeted people fast: You can follow someone else’s list with one click or choose a few people off their list to follow in your main timeline. This makes following a very targeted group very quick to do.

Follow accounts without them knowing: It would be nice to be able to keep tabs on your competitors on Twitter without getting their attention, wouldn’t it? Keep an eye on them without adding to their follower account? You can by listing them on a private list.

Never Miss Important Tweets: Now that I follow more than 2,000 people I’ve had to get creative to prevent missing tweets from the people that I care about the most. This has led me to create private lists like “Clients” so that I always know what they’re up to and can help them out if needed and another list called “VIPs” for my closest friends and family so that I don’t miss their news.

You can turn any word into a hashtag simply by putting the # symbol ahead of it. You can’t have any spaces or special characters in a hashtag.

Before using a hashtag for the first time, it’s worth looking to see how people use it. Run a search on Twitter for your chosen tag to see if it is being used and how.

I have used #rdg as an example above. #Reading is already being used by book lovers all over the world so it would make no sense to use it to talk about traffic, weather or events local to the town of Reading in Berkshire. Residents have chosen to use #rdg instead.

This shows how important it is to check a hashtag before using it. By using a hashtag, you are making yourself a part of an online community.

How are recruiters using hashtags?

1. Learning

Twitter chats are a great way to learn. A Twitter chat is a discussion that takes place at a predetermined time using a hashtag to help participants keep track of the debate. Popular Twitter Chats for recruiters include; #TalentNet #TChat #HFChat #JobHuntChat #CareerChat.

Recruiters also use hashtags to share relevant links and information all the time, like: #socialrecruiting and #uksourcers.

Hashtags are great for spotting people in other industries doing exactly what recruiters are doing above and more.

Just last week I discovered that nurses have a fortnightly Twitter chat on the tag #NTtwitChat.

https://twitter.com/twigfish/status/233176413904203778

This sort of things goes on in many industries. Do you know if there is a Twitter chat for users in your market places?

You can also track events happening in your niche. For example, there is a meetup of the London Ruby Users Group today. You can track who is attending using the #LRUG hashtag.

3. Advertising, Promotion and Branding

This option is much more tricky as it’s very easy for an inexperienced Twitter user to look like a spammer when they try to use a hashtag to promote a job.

There was a time when the #rdg hashtag was flooded by recruiters trying to promote jobs in the Reading area. This might make sense to us as recruiters and sourcers but those Tweets were only relevant to very few Reading residents – only a small percentage would be looking for a job at all and even fewer would be appropriate for it. It can actually be quite damaging to the brand of a recruitment business. Something like #rdgjobs, promoted very occasionally on the main #rdg tag would have been a better strategy.

The same happens when you take an industry hashtag to promote jobs, you can end up displacing the original users of the tag, making your efforts pointless. Better to invent your own tag and promote it occasionally on the main tag.

Hashtags like #jobs, #job and #careers are very popular, but are used so much that it makes it unlikely your one job would be seen. They can still be useful though as job seekers can team up the hashtag with an industry, skill or location keyword to find jobs relevant to them.

Research tags and find one that has a community and content relevant to what you are planning to share. You want to be enriching a community by providing genuinely useful and interesting content.

If you are using a tool like bit.ly or hootsuite to shorten links to your content then you will see what content gets the most clicks. Most people find that hashtags greatly increase engagement factors like clicks, retweets and @replies.

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Yesterday Twitter announced that they have made some major improvements to Twitter Search. Some of the new features may be important in helping you engage with a targeted audience.

Many of the new Twitter Search features don’t seem to be live across the board yet.

Spelling Corrections: Twitter should now make suggestions if it thinks you have spelled a word incorrectly. I have tried deliberately misspelling words, but am yet to see this feature in action.

Related Searches: Twitter will now suggest you other searches that you might be interested in. It sounds like Twitter will suggest search terms that provide more results for you. I am yet to see this feature in action for a search other than Twitter’s example of ‘Jeremy Lin’.

Real Names and Usernames in Results: According to twitter “When you search for a name like ‘Jeremy Lin,’ you’ll see results mentioning that person’s real name and their Twitter account username.” When I search for ‘Katharine Robinson’ though, it does not return results mentioning @TheSourceress too. This feature does work with Twitter’s ‘Jeremy Lin’ example – I can only suppose that the feature is a work in progress.

Probably the most useful new Twitter Search feature is working and working well

Results from people you follow: Up until now, when you ran a search on twitter.com, you got the option of seeing ‘All’ tweets or just the ‘Top’ tweets. There is now an added option to see results from only the ‘People you follow’.

It shouldn’t be underestimated just how tricky this was for Twitter to build – with Tweets coming in at 250 million per day, separating them out by an arbitrary list of users must have been a technical nightmare!

Twitter have got this feature working perfectly though – I have used it already to see what my network is saying about the Formula 1 racing at the British Grande Prix this weekend, rather than sifting through the noise of all the tweets about the F1 today.

The ‘People you follow’ results are a great feature if you are using Twitter to engage with a particular community. For example, I almost exclusively follow UK based recruitment professionals from the @UKSourcers Twitter account. I want to engage with that community because those are the people I want to work with. I don’t always want to talk to them about recruitment though – I have other interests and so do they. I can now run a search for ‘cheese’ or ‘F1’ or ‘pie’, see which UK recruiters are talking about those things and join in.

I expect that those of you using Twitter for recruiting purposes have accounts that follow people who are all involved with your particular niches – the exact people you want to engage with. You now have a tool to help you find people in your niche community that share other things in common with you. This will help you build more meaningful relationships.

This feature also adds incentive to corporate Twitter accounts to follow back real people – they will now be missing out even more by not following back those that have shown an interest in their brand as an employer.

How will you be using these new Twitter Search features?

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Twitter is great if you are starting to explore Social Media or looking to learn more about Sourcing. It has been instrumental as part of my professional development and led to virtually all my business, one way or another. Twitter has helped me discover loads of useful content and meet many very smart people.

I had the luxury of learning how to use Twitter when it was a much quieter, more relaxed place. There were hardly any businesses or celebrities yet – I remember the day that Stephen Fry joined. There was no pressure to be getting “ROI” out of it – it was just a fun way to connect with like minded people.

It seems easy to succumb to these pressures now and end up not getting the most out of this fantastic platform.

So, when you join Twitter, please don’t…

Excessively tweet links to jobs

The Problem: Lisa Jones of Barclay Jones recently wrote about this problem on the UK recruiter blog, I recommend having a read. While Job tweets are of interest to active job seekers, the majority of people are not actively looking for a new job and might need a more subtle approach. Plus – it’s REALLY BORING!

What to do instead: While jobs are a very easy thing to tweet when you are a beginner, you do have a wealth of experience in your industry and in recruitment – why not demonstrate this on Social Media? Take a look at this list of 20 things for recruiters and sourcers to tweet about. You could always set up a separate Twitter account that just tweets links to job, but be clear that this is all it does and let followers know how they can actually talk to you.

Follow loads of people at once

The Problem: Following people is probably the best way to get their attention, so don’t waste it. When you first join Twitter, you won’t have said much and you won’t be entirely sure what you are doing. If someone follows me and they haven’t tweeted yet then I am unlikely to follow them back as I don’t know what I will be signing up for. The same goes for someone that has only Tweeted five times – I don’t know if that person is just dipping their toe in the birdbath or if they will stick with it.

What to do instead: Lay low for a week or two. Get your profile looking good with a well written bio and a profile picture. You should also get some Tweets under your belt and learn how the lingo works. Follow a few colleagues or people that you know use Twitter well (aim for about 20 people) that way you can learn from what they do – what sort of Tweets do you like to get in your stream? Once you have found your feet, take Twitter to the next level and follow some more people. Rince and repeat.

Thoughtlessly connect Twitter with LinkedIn and/or Facebook

The Problem: It’s very easy to think that you are saving time and being very efficient by sending all your tweets to LinkedIn or all your Facebook updates to Twitter, but it creates all kinds of jarring issues that newbies will find confusing and experienced Twitter users will find annoying. The language used on each of the platforms is different and Facebook and LinkedIn will allow you longer format updates than Twitter.

What to do instead: It is a minefield that I recommend avoiding. If you must do it, be sure to dive into the settings on LinkedIn and Facebook and understand what you’re really sharing and when. I have written about the problem of sending your LinkedIn updates to Twitter before.

Drop Tweet Bombs

The Problem: I read lots of posts about “doing social media” in 10 minutes per day and the like. While it is possible, it seems that most people think you should send out an entire day’s worth of tweets all at once. This will totally take over your followers’ Twitter streams. That is considered a bit rude in Twitterville.

What to do instead: I’d recommend using a tool like buffer to spread your Tweets out through the day. Also, if you decide to have your jobs or blog posts sent to Twitter automatically via an app like twitterfeed or dlvr.it – please dive into the settings and make sure that it won’t tweet 10 jobs at once. If you are unsure what you are doing – don’t do it!

Turn every word into a #Hashtag

The Problem: It is very simple – tweets containing lots of hashtags are difficult to read, eyeballs skip right over them. If your tweet looks fugly – I’m not clicking on the link!

The Solution: Hashtags are an important way to get noticed when you start out on Twitter, so don’t be put off using them. Keep hashtags to a minimum, one or two is usually plenty. If you want to use more then maybe try some A B Testing to see which works best – does a tweet with #jobs get more clicks and reactions than a tweet with #careers? You should ALWAYS check how a hashtag is being used already, if at all, before including it.

Do you have any Dos and Don’ts for Twitter newbies? Let us know in the comments 🙂

Social Media

Google Plus is arguably the most powerful resource to emerge for sourcers and people researchers for a long time. Irina Shamaeva shared a great post on the SourceCon blog about Google+ for People Sourcing.

If you represent a sizable brand and have not heard of Glassdoor.com, then it might be time to check it out. Glassdoor is a site where people can share information about companies from salaries to company culture to what an interview is like. The site is mainly US focused but is starting to see some usage in Europe and the UK. You might also find this video interview with Samantha Zupan, Corporate Communications Director at Glassdoor.com, interesting.

If you have anything you’d like to share on our weekly news round-up then do let me know – are you hoping to hire a sourcer or an Internet savvy recruiter, planning an event or know of a great tool? Then get in touch.

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UK Sourcers is a community run by Katharine Robinson (aka TheSourceress).

It is a resource for UK recruitment professionals to learn more about Internet sourcing techniques.